“The pet psychic actually said he’s very imaginative, he’s very creative, in the sense that he’ll imagine himself hunting or hiding,” Lewis says of his beloved cat, Monkey.

And here’s the thing: Even as a newborn reality TV star – the third installment airs Tuesday at 10 p.m. on Bravo – Lewis knew that the world would get to know all this stuff. And he was more or less cool with that.

“When I got into it, I told the production company and the network to show all sides of me,” he says over lunch at a Los Feliz restaurant the day after the second episode aired. “After all, I’m human. I have bad days, I have meltdowns, just like everybody else.”

What he didn’t expect was the way he felt once he saw himself in the unflattering mirror of his television.

“You can have people tell you how you are, but until you see yourself on a 40-inch plasma TV, you really can’t know,” says Lewis, 37, who grew up in Orange County.

And so he decided he had to change.

• • •

As a kid, there were plenty of clues to hint at his future.

His family moved a lot – from Mission Viejo to Villa Park to Laguna Niguel – as his real-estate investor dad, Tom Lewis, bought and sold houses and commercial property.

His favorite toys were Lincoln Logs and Legos – always building. At 18, fresh out of Mater Dei High School, he bought a Lake Forest condo, hoping to flip it and make a quick profit. Instead he lost $3,500.

A year after graduating from Chapman University in 1993, he bought a Santa Ana house and flipped it for a quick $35,000 profit.

That soon turned into five multi-unit rentals in Orange County. But he was unhappy with his day job, so he quit and moved to Los Angeles, working at a casting company and then a music-licensing firm.

But those jobs frustrated, too, as did the drag of being a landlord. So he sold his Orange County properties and, in 1998, bought a $240,000 house in Hancock Park, an elegant Los Angeles neighborhood.

A few months and an extensive remodel later, he’d earned a profit of $55,000.

And that was that. “It was my dream job,” Lewis says. “I could wake up when I want, work when I want.”

With the profits and a second investor, he bought two houses and started his career, endlessly fixing and flipping.

Then he hired his first assistant.

• • •

Flash forward eight years, to 2006. Lewis has successfully flipped 30-some houses, mostly in Los Feliz and Hancock Park. He also employs a full entourage: three assistants, a trash guy and Zoila, his live-in housekeeper.

And he was doing just fine without exposing his life to the scrutiny of gawking TV viewers, high-minded critics and catty bloggers.

Then one day, two of his employees – Jenni Pulos and her husband, Chris Elwood, the trash guy – come to him with a pitch. Both actors, they’d interested a TV production company in a project called “The Wannabes,” about their relentless drive for Hollywood fame and success.

The couple asked Lewis if they could shoot footage at work for him – their day jobs – and he agreed to the jaw-dropping delight of the producers.

“They said, ‘Oh my God, we have to meet this guy!'” Lewis says.

He agreed to let them pitch a show about him – thinking the exposure might help his goal of writing a series of real-estate themed books – and the show sold quickly. “The Wannabes” did not.

Taping began in February. Lewis, true to form, tried to control every frame.

“I was prepared, but I wasn’t prepared,” he says. “It was invasive. It was stressful. I thought I’d be able to control what was filmed. And after the first week…I was exhausted trying to control things.”

After the second week he surrendered to the cameras.

“Maybe that was a really bad decision. We don’t know yet.”

Times were bad, both financially and personally. The cameras captured every tantrum.

“It brings back a period of my life that I’d rather not re-live,” Lewis says. “And it’s alwayson reruns. Zoila has it on her TV constantly. I walk by her room and hear myself screaming.”

The way he has been portrayed, two episodes into the six-episode run, is not an exaggeration. “I really was, at that time, I was a monster,” Lewis says.

“If nothing else, I’ve been able to watch myself and change.”

He has apologized to his assistants – several times over.

“Last night, I watched the show with Jenni. And there came a point that I had my hands over my face. The part where I said, ‘You wouldn’t have a house if it wasn’t’ for me, you wouldn’t eat if it wasn’t for me.’ And I apologized again.”

What he’s learned, he says, is that he needs to learn to get a grip – on his anger and stress, his obsessing, his tendency to talk down to employees he considers friends.

“I don’t think it was any accident I was filmed in that time,” Lewis says. “If you believe in spiritual things, I think there’s a reason. And I do believe there’s a reason I’m being shown this.”

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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